In purchasing maize, market solutions best

- compromise good security in the coming year. If current stocks aren’t purchased, possibly at reasonably good prices, changes that farmers may avoid cultivating the crop in the coming season are not negligible. There is a trap that policy makers lay.

There is indeed credible fear of food insecurity as those who plant maize to obtain a surplus to sell will redirect their efforts elsewhere, as it is unlikely that the government will meet both demands of farmers in the next few months. The first demand is to purchase the crop and the second is to do so at reasonably good prices, as at the moment maize prices have reached rock bottom. This situation appears to be favoured by the two purchasing agencies, the NFRA and the Cereals and Other Produce Board of Tanzania (CPB), which has a long list of countries in which it is seeking markets or has sales centres.

MPs expressed concern that maize prices dropped to 300/- per kilo and even to 200/- while farmers spend in the range of 356/- to 479/- to produce one kilogram of maize, in which case the government needs to control rising prices of agricultural inputs and open doors for business people to purchase and export maize. There wasn’t much of a promise by those responding in that regard, as in both spheres there are agencies with close links with government departments, whose budgetary projections can’t be easily touched. At the same time, exporting of maize is being done by the cereals board instead of real traders.

Kilolo MP Justin Nyamoga had presented a motion requesting the House to suspend scheduled business for Thursday to allow MPs to discuss matters related to dropping maize prices and lack of markets. The crucial issue he reflected upon was that maize farmers in the southern regions solely depend on maize farming to raise income, lamenting that the government has failed the farmers with the 14bn/- disbursed to NFRA for purchasing the grain, It amounts to just around five percent of all the maize stock available.

Even if not all the worries of the MP come to fruition, half of the ailment seems to be there to stay and another half is being solved willy-nilly, with NFRA and CPB actually being handed the cash with which to buy the remaining crop, but not at the prices that farmers find acceptable. Were it that traders were freely going around purchasing maize and selling it across the borders, most of it would have been bought early and be sold to farmers’ benefit. When the foreign market is handed to crop authorities, they stall to purchase so that the local price drops and the foreign prices may rise as harvesting season has elapsed.

The crop bodies and the ministry along with MPs may still debate. But farmers will diminish the sort of attention they give to the crop in the coming year or two, in which case local prices will rise, to the ire of urban consumers in particular. Whatever the case the monopolies will get hefty profits, and what happens next is anyone’s guess, right?